Could Ferguson happen here? Some would say it already did — nearly five decades ago.

Days of sometimes violent demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo., erupted after Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen, was shot dead by a police officer Aug. 9, allegedly in self-defense. At the height of the civil rights movement, the Watts riots were triggered after a young black motorist was pulled over and arrested by a white California Highway Patrolman on Aug. 11, 1965, on suspicion of drunken driving.

The struggle to arrest him sparked six days of rioting that claimed the lives of 34 people, injured more than 1,000, resulted in more than 4,000 arrests and caused an estimated $40 million in property damage.

“Those same class issues, that same sense of racial inequality, social inequality, economic inequality, those same frustrations and resentments that roiled 49 years ago and exploded in the Watts riots are still in effect in 2014,” said USC law professor Jody Armour, an expert in crime and race issues. “We see them bursting out in Ferguson, Missouri, rather than in L.A.”

Since those same conditions still exist in areas like South Los Angeles, Watts, Inglewood and Compton, Armour said, “we could be the next Ferguson.”

Meanwhile, an incident Monday in South L.A. in which two Los Angeles Police Department officers shot and killed 25-year-old Ezell Ford, a black man described by family as mentally challenged, has also evoked strong concerns from community members. Police, in a preliminary account, said Ford was shot after he attempted to grab a gun from an officer’s holster during a struggle on the ground with that officer. Veteran gang enforcement officers had stopped Ford, who was walking on 65th Street near Broadway about 8:10 p.m., during an “investigative stop” for unknown reasons. Both officers, who police have not identified, have been assigned home duty while a probe by the department’s Force Investigation Division continues, an LAPD spokesman said.

Hundreds are expected to gather at 3 p.m. today in front of LAPD headquarters to protest the shooting.

A common thread links the Ezell Ford case in South L.A. to the Michael Brown case in Ferguson and even to the case of Trayvon Martin, the Florida teen who was shot in February 2012 by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, said Councilman Bernard Parks, a former LAPD chief. All involve young, unarmed black men who are viewed by community members as victims of the police or a vigilante and who appear to have died needlessly.

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Parks warned that such events must be viewed with sensitivity in every community as tensions in one part of the country can easily inflame those in another.

“You can’t view something that happened in Florida as something that doesn’t affect Los Angeles,” Parks said. “With the Trayvon Martin issue, they had demonstrations all over the nation, and some of them turned into acts of public destruction. You can no longer, because of social media and 24-hour news, view any of these cases in isolation.”

What complicates matters in Ferguson and in South L.A. is that there are conflicting accounts of what actually happened from police and others. Because some people have already assigned blame, even the most objective investigation may not satisfy them if its conclusion doesn’t match their own, Parks said.

“There’s a need for law enforcement to understand that (racially charged) incidents will occur,” Parks said. “There has to be on a daily basis — well before these incidents occur — an accumulation of goodwill, a professional relationship, communication with the public so that if something should happen badly, that the first reaction is not to go out and get involved in a riot.”

South Los Angeles activist Lita Herron said she lived through the Watts race riots of 1965 and the “nightmare” era of 1992 — the year of the Rodney King riots — when police tried to “arrest their way out of” the community’s problems of drugs, addiction and gangs. Incidents like the death of Ford, she said, make her feel that the progress she’s seen in her neighborhood in recent years may be slipping away.

“I’m a survivor of 1992, of the (Los Angeles Police) department — who it was and always had been in our history,” said Herron, who is president of the Youth Advocacy Coalition, which offers alternatives to a gang lifestyle. “There’s always been that line between me (and them), and it’s a fragile line, and these things like Ezell Ford fractures or kills any progress. It kills trust, demolishes it. It makes what they say just talk.”

Differences noted

But Connie Rice, a local civil rights attorney, sees differences between Ferguson and Los Angeles. Unlike L.A., Ferguson is a predominantly black community with only one African-American on its six-member City Council and very few on its police force. Two decades ago, LAPD was in a similar situation, much like the Ferguson Police Department is now — in “a state of war” with a distrustful black community.

But with the help of federal oversight, community-minded reforms and guidance from civilian police commissions, the department has largely transformed from a militarized, hostile force that few trusted to one that is building relationships with the community and earning greater trust, she said.

“I think L.A. is at the top (among large cities) if we keep up this campaign of change,” Rice said. “We have about 15 years of more work to do, but we have come a mighty long way.”

Bias, whether conscious or not, also plays a role. Armour, the USC professor, said that to many officers and citizens, the sight of a large black man seems to trigger the use of lethal force.

“If it’s a police officer who shoots a black citizen, he or she will say either I was justified because they actually did pose an imminent threat of death or serious injury to me or if I wasn’t actually justified, at least I should be excused...for expressing ordinary human frailty under circumstances of extreme pressure and stress,” said Armour, author of “Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism: The Hidden Costs of Being Black in America.”

Juries have repeatedly been shown to be sympathetic to such arguments involving police officers as well as citizens, as demonstrated in the case of neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, he said.

And studies show, Armour said, that people indeed consider race in assessing the dangerousness of an ambiguous person. A 2005 Florida State University Study, for example, found that officers in a computer simulation were more likely to mistakenly shoot unarmed black suspects than white ones until they underwent additional training.

While African-Americans are disproportionately represented in committing street crimes and in the criminal justice system, they are also disproportionately poor and disadvantaged, Armour said. He contends these issues can only be addressed by redistributing some of the nation’s wealth and power, thereby curbing frustration and resentments.

“In Ferguson, they’re looking at a lack of jobs, grinding poverty and have a general sense of hopelessness that arises out of that, and these police incidents are often just sparks,” he said. “They are flash points for a lot of grievances that have to do with class as well as with enforcement, that have to do with equal opportunities, economic inequalities as much as particular encounters with particular police officers.”